iPhone 3G Multi-touch

I finished writing a driver for the Zephyr2 on the iPhone. It's the same multi-touch solution that Apple has used starting from the first generation iPod touch and up to and including the iPad.

Now, of course this shouldn't be construed as a promise to support the iPad eventually, but this multi-touch driver is definitely a concrete milestone that is important for pretty much all of Apple's mobile Internet devices.

More immediately, this is pretty much the sole remaining blocking issue on the first-gen iPod touch and one of the two major issues on the iPhone 3G. The other issue on the iPhone 3G is baseband SPI. I'm wondering if we can get away with just using the debug uart to make calls (if we don't care about having a fast 3G data connection yet).



Also, I'd like some opinions from this blog's readers: More frequent updates? Or just document the major advances?

The port to the iPhone 3G is coming along. This is a picture of an iPhone 3G booting into a BusyBox / Buildroot shell. As you can see, wireless networking is working great. We can also talk to the baseband over the debugging channel. This might be enough to get calling, etc., working but we may need to figure out the SPI transport.

I'd still like to get the WM8991 codec working for it in openiboot (shouldn't be much trouble since there's a datasheet), just so we can iron out any quirks before testing it inside the kernel. We also need a new multi-touch driver (they've upgraded from Zephyr to Zephyr2). After that, we'll have a working port of Android.

Also, for existing developers and testers, I've implemented the Android wi-fi driver extensions so WLAN should be working better now. I know people had problems associating with WPA protected networks, etc. See if this update helps!

Android repos are up

We've gotten a tremendous response -- far more than I've actually anticipated before the release. I would like to thank the community for their interest. The amount of support and enthusiasm that was displayed was truly humbling to someone used to cynicism about this project.

The thing I'm most excited about is the fact there are now many developers working on several different things... a pretty big change from when I was hacking on the source tree virtually alone. There are developers actively working on the first generation iPod port, the iPhone 3G port, and a second-generation iPod touch port and things are moving much more quickly than I've anticipated. With so many helping hands, I'm sure that we can get these ports to production quality.

To coordinate our efforts, I've setup a series of git repositories on GitHub. You can clone the Android tree using Google's repo tool thus:

repo init -u git://github.com/planetbeing/platform_manifest.git -b android-sdk-1.6_r2-iphone

This command populates the majority of the tree from the main Android kernel.org repositories, with any changed project from my tree.

git://github.com/planetbeing/kernel_common.git branch android-2.6.32-iphone is our kernel tree. It is included in the main repo checkout as well.

git://github.com/planetbeing/iphonelinux.git as always is our openiboot/bootloader tree. New hardware support will be trialled there and then ported into the Linux kernel.

A fellow with the nickname of "konaya" on IRC has volunteered to administer a website for us at http://www.idroidproject.org. We can use the wiki to document iPhone Linux/iDroid and the forums to provide help to newcomers. We also have a developer mailing list (please ask in IRC if you wish to get added to that).

A to-do list

I'm gratified at a lot of the developers that want to help! This is the only way this project can stay alive. That being said, let's start to get a little organized. Here's a to-do list:

http://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=IPhoneLinux_To-Do

I'm proposing that unless someone wants to step in to host and administer an iPhone Linux website/wiki/forums, we use the iPhone Wiki to exchange information since it's there already. That said, Be Bold and work on whatever you like! If you have patches to openiboot, send them using git. If you have patches for the kernel or Android stuff, just contact me with it (IRC preferred, e-mail is okay) and I'll see about how we can publish them.

I'll personally be focusing on the first gen iPod touch and 3G port since I think I have a comparative advantage in that area.

Android running on iPhone!

I've been working on this quietly in the background. Sorry about the initial video quality, but YouTube promises that the quality will get better as the video gets processed more. The back part of the version I uploaded to Vimeo was cut off.



I think that says it all, really. Donations via paypal to planetbeing at gmail.com. If you'd like to help, come join #iphonelinux on irc.osx86.hu.

Thanks to CPICH for reversing support, harmn1, posixninja, jean, marcan and saurik for patches, and last but not least, TheSeven for his work on the FTL.

Pre-built images and sources at http://graphite.sandslott.org:4080/pub/idroid/idroid-release-0.1a.tar.bz. Read the README. For generic openiboot instructions, there's plenty now that you can search for.

It should be pretty simple to port forward to the iPhone 3G. The 3GS will take more work. Hopefully with all this groundwork laid out, we can make Android a real alternative or supplement for iPhone users. Maybe we can finally get Flash. ;)

EDIT: Apparently on some iPhones, the installation of openiboot appears to be failing (THIS MEANS IT WON'T BOOT UP AGAIN). This is being investigated (I can't reproduce it on my own phone), but meanwhile you can just do a "tethered boot". In openiboot console, don't install but do !zImage, kernel, !android.img.gz, ramdisk, boot "console=tty root=/dev/ram0 init=/init rw" (after installing the other images to the second partition). If your phone won't boot up again, a DFU restore will get it back to normal. Take a deep breath. Calm down. There's nothing to worry about. :) We'll get this sorted out by tomorrow.

EDIT2: Fixed! It was previously only working on phones that used PwnageTool due to some assumption I made. Thanks geohot! Redownload the archive or just openiboot.img3